PM leads into election with a symbolic strike

It’s election year and already the first election-related stunt is dominating the political agenda.

Julia Gillard
’s melodramatic announcement on Tuesday that she had demanded that the ALP national executive suspend party processes, dump a sitting senator and put in a “captain’s pick" outsider dripped with calculated, election-year symbolism.

The first and glaringly obvious intention of this pre-emptive strike was to reinforce the impression of Gillard as a tough and decisive leader.

Since her “misogyny moment" last October when Gillard threw caution to the wind and ripped into
Tony Abbott
over the gender issue, her advisers have been working to reinforce the image of a leader of strength, feistiness and resolve.

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When asked to defend her unilateral decision to demand that the Labor Party bowed to her will on the Nova Peris endorsement, Gillard simply said: “Well, I took a leader’s decision and that’s it."

She said later: “These are tough decisions. It’s a leadership decision and I made one."

In case anyone missed it, Gillard has laid on with a trowel the message behind the symbolism.

A second symbolic purpose was to signal that Gillard was prepared to use her leadership authority to back her rhetoric with action.

Gillard’s misogyny speech about her passionate commitment to fighting for women’s rights could hardly be better demonstrated than by starting the election year by personally intervening in the party’s internal processes to demand that it make way for the first female, indigenous member of Federal Parliament.

That Peris was not even a member of the Labor Party only reinforced the perception that the prime minister was prepared to risk her own authority to force the party to do what its internal processes had failed to do for more than a century.

The more the party bucks at Gillard’s extraordinary unilateralism, the better it will make her look – provided that she prevails, as she is certain to do. Rebuffing Gillard would be catastrophic.

Much of the internal bitching over how Gillard went about dumping
Trish Crossin
and importing Peris is self-serving tosh anyway. Crossin has had a 15-year career in the Senate for which she can thank the hopeless mess that is Labor’s internal pre-selection system.

Crossin was put there and kept there by the union movement’s backroom power brokers who control so many Labor pre-selection decisions (in Crossin’s case the left-wing unions, which explains why the loudest protests about her treatment have come from the left).

That Crossin was set to be pre-selected for another term, but for Gillard’s intervention, is evidence of what is wrong with the Labor Party’s self-serving, union-controlled internal processes.

Gillard’s “act of leadership" `would have been a lot more impressive if she had been prepared to give her authority to desperately needed big reforms to break the grip of the unions and open the Labor Party to a much broader grass-roots involvement and influence. But Gillard has squibbed that challenge.